Get behind the universe
by bookmawkish
Summary: Chin tucked, eyebrows lowered, eyes deep in their cadaverous sockets and full of small-scale, personal murder. The Doctor is furious at the ill treatment she has received.


Clara falls. No-one catches her.

She strikes the floor first on her hip, bruising and jarring, then with her shoulder, rolling and painful. Despite the pain, her fear drives her to twist as rapidly as she can and get back on her feet, feeling the throb of the bruise growing hot.

The _thing_ that hit her is already almost on top of her. Oh, the Doctor had given it a name: he always knows the name for everything. She's forgotten it now. After all, when something's trying to kill you, the last thing on your mind is what planet it comes from and what scientists call it when they're writing the latest copy of _Carnivorous Aliens I Have Known_. What seems salient is that it's huge, sickly green, reeking and amorphous, and seems to enjoy extruding lengthy tentacles to strike at whatever happens to look edible. Seconds earlier it had looked almost human. A good disguise, considering how often alien races Clara has met seem to turn out to have the same basic quantity of limbs, eyes, noses. But all is certainly revealed now, while it's trying to eat her.

It makes a bubbling, unearthly noise. Clara has learnt to redefine what unearthly means to her during her recent life. She doesn't scream, not even when the tentacles extrude, invade the air around her, then start to invade her. Into her ears, her nose, her mouth -

Then: "Doct-"

But too late. No more words are possible. The taste is unbearable, the texture that of matted, clotted hair. She gags as her throat closes up around the tentacle.

And then it's gone. All of it is gone. Her vision fills with dark cloth and silver hair. A big, pale hand has put the tentacle in a squeeze grip and has yanked it backward so it leaves her throat in a nauseating, slithering rush.

The Doctor is there, suddenly in front of her, up on the toes of his boots, his already impressive height looming unbelievably despite the bubbling seven-foot mound of tentacles and hunger he's confronting. She's hunching over and trying not to choke on the memory of that violating taste, and she feels his hand on her upper arm.

Not reassuring her. Not comforting her. Moving her.

He's putting her behind him with a firmly controlled push. As he takes up stance before her, his coat flares wide with that flash of concealed red, like an angry frilled lizard showing its colours. Chin tucked, eyebrows lowered, eyes deep in their cadaverous sockets and full of small-scale, personal murder. The Doctor is furious at the ill treatment she has received.

He is so much more terrifying in his individual, almost human rage than she could ever have expected. He has, of course, protected her before - his younger body has put his tweed and his bow tie between her and the darkness a hundred times. And she has protected him. But in both their cases, it had always felt like their mutual protection had been a small part of a huge web: a massive zig-zag path stretching across the universe from its dawn to its death. Clara and the Doctor. The Lord of Time and his Impossible Girl. Caught up together in something greater; greater than both of them, greater than death. Getting behind the Doctor was like hiding behind the universe itself. Far too big to conceptualise.

But the way this new one protects her right now, in this moment, doesn't feel like anything greater than what it is.

In this moment, he's an angry Glaswegian who's just seen his girl felt up by the alien equivalent of a Saturday night drunk from Paisley. There's probably not much in the universe can compete with that for sheer levels of threatening.

"Right," he growls. "_You_." The finger jabs. The lips draw back from the big, fearsomely square teeth. The Doctor is _spitting _with rage, his jaw locked and grinding. His finger swings backward to take in Clara. "That. That was more than getting my attention. That was rude." In his accent, which has deepened in his fury, it comes out more like _root_. Behind him, Clara coughs and wheezes, trying to clear her lungs enough to get involved in this conversation, because she can tell it's going to end badly if she doesn't. The sound seems to incense her protector further.

"That was _nasty_."

A step forward. The younger Doctor had been able to make armies and megalomaniacs step back with a long, half-amused look and a single step forward. Armies and megalomaniacs care about the grand path of the universe and, confronted by the immensity the Doctor represented on that stage, they would often step aside in awe.

The older Doctor steps right into the tentacled thing's personal space and when it doesn't back away, he gets right up into what's passing for its face and snaps: "And only _I_ get to be nasty to her!"

Individual beasts, however, care only about their personal hunger. Her eyes blurring with tears from the coughing, she can only see the Doctor's back, rearing protectively before her, impossibly tall. His shoulders, up and angular in righteous indignation. Then more blur. Tentacles lunging for the new target. Confusion. Violence. And now he needs her to protect him, once again.

"Doct- Doc…" The words still feel stuck behind the memory of the tentacle. But the sounds coming from in front of her are terrible. "_Doctor_!"

The moment she can breathe properly, she drags him off. Actually slaps him to get him to stop. She's glad to see that the tentacle thing still appears to be alive. Because this is how she protects him, now: if he wants to be a good man he'll protect the bits of him that are and restrain the bits that don't do so well when their dander is up.

She puts her hands on his arms, feeling the tension. Not moving him, not this time. Reassuring him. Comforting him. "Easy," she murmurs, keeping the telling-off he's completely due for later. Later, when he's actually looking at her and seeing her rather than past her and seeing red. "Easy."

It only occurs to her later that perhaps, for this Doctor, she's going to be his universe to hide behind.


End file.
